Just a few minutes ago I downloaded PicLens, a neat image-browser plugin for Firefox (IE and Safari are also supported). This plugin enables you to browse through (online) images galleries with a really smooth interface. All pictures are place on a virtual "wall" and by clicking them you can enlarge them. It’s almost like watching paintings in a museum (although less boring for most of us). The plugin loads quickly and navigation is extremely natural. We have seen this kind of navigation before in the Microsoft SeaDragon demos, but this time you can try it on your own system. Although not as advanced as SeaDragon, PicLens is a "finished" & working product… And it’s free too.

If you thought that the TabEffect plugin was cool, you’ll be amazed what this does, I promise!

The way PicLens works: the browser plugin picks up a RSS feed generated by the site and retrieves the images from there. Most popular image sites are supported like Flickr, Picasa, Live Images and Google Image search.

To help promote this plugin, there’s also a flash-based version called PicLens-Lite, which does also generate a nice gallery (although the plugin itself is much better).

After you’ve installed PicLens you can go to my Flickr page, press the blue "arrow" icon on any of the images to browse them.